One of the few Jerry Goldsmith scoring sessions I had the privilege of attending was for The Sum of All Fears, the fourth Jack Ryan movie (and in effect, a reboot of the series) directed by Phil Alden Robinson. Years later, I would then have the opportunity to put together an expanded release of the soundtrack. The highlight of the score is the opening title, an operatic and heart-wrenching aria sung by Shana Blake Hill, but it was a pleasure to rediscover …

Although we couldn’t announce it at the time, the truth of the matter is, we were working on The Matrix Revolutions immediately after completion (and prior to release!) on The Matrix Reloaded. The source for this expanded soundtrack came, like the preceding title, from Don Davis’ own personal ProTools archive. That yielded us the highest quality elements to use for the project. And like with Reloaded, music editor Zig Gron was incredibly helpful in getting us any Juno Reactor sources that weren’t in Don’s archive, …

Back in college, I made a short film that parodied John Carpenter’s Escape From New York and Escape From L.A. I had no composer to score the film, so I tracked in music from Shirley Walker and John Carpenter’s score to the second film. Little did I know that, 16 years later, I would revisit the material, but in a more in-depth manner. It turns out that there was a lot of music that had gone unreleased from the original …

After the great experience working with Dynamic Music Partners (Michael McCuistion, Lolita Ritmanis and Kristopher Carter) on Young Justice last year, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to work with them again on the album for Batman the Brave and the Bold. Working with the variety of artwork assets provided by the fine folks at Warner Bros., I tried to keep the same design aesthetic that they had created for for the home video releases. Probably the biggest challenge I had was …

After working on Red 2 with La-La Land Records and Lionsgate Records, the wonderful folks at LGR asked me if I had done iTunes digital booklets. I hadn’t, but knew what the template and limitations were. They liked what I had done with Red 2 and said they’d be in touch at some point if a project arose that they could hire me for. Months later, that project arrived: The Legend of Hercules. It was a rather straightforward project: they provided me …

Dead Again marked the first score by Patrick Doyle that I heard, and it instantly captivated me with it’s strong themes, classic orchestration, and choral finale. It’s still one of my favorite Doyle scores, and when it came to light that the album rights had reverted back to Paramount, I pushed for us to explore an expanded re-issue of the soundtrack. The assets for the music originally came from a DAT source, but it was missing a handful of cues. When transferring …

Back the spring of 2006, I had the good fortune to not only attend the scoring sessions for Bryan Singer’s quasi-sequel Superman Returns, but was able to shoot hours of video for a mini-documentary I put together for the music team. Some of my footage ended up in the “multimedia” portion of the original Rhino Records soundtrack album, but that pretty much concluded my involvement with the project – until now. Working with the audio files direct from the ProTools …

Like with Jobs, the way this project came about was one of coincidental (and good) timing. La-La Land Records had a CD signing this summer for a bunch of our composers, including John Debney who was there to sign Jobs albums. He mentioned that he had just finished up work on the anticipated miniseries Bonnie & Clyde, which would be airing simultaneously on three networks: A&E, Lifetime, and History Channel. A PR blitz was about to begin, and so we …

Days of Thunder features a pretty kick-ass score by Hans Zimmer, which was strangely never released. The 1990 car racing flick features a power-anthem score with rock elements and emotional beats, and a really catchy theme, which was adapted into the song “The Last Note of Freedom”, which Zimmer wrote with Billy Idol. The audio assets for Days of Thunder came from analog tapes in the Paramount archives, which were transferred by Johnny Dee Davis at Precision AudioSonics. I then cut …

Apparently Black Beauty was not going to be the last Danny Elfman project of 2013 for me. 2011’s Restless was a small film that Gus Van Sant directed, which featured a very enjoyable score by Elfman that oddly never got a soundtrack album. Working with Sony Pictures, I handled the art direction on the project, utilizing the key art elements and movie stills to put together a package that reflected the same tone and style of the poster. The only …